An aberrant examination of the intersection of perfume, pop culture, and politics

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Blair Witch

"Blair Witch" is a faceless remake disguised as a faceless sequel, intended for teenagers to see in multiplexes with giant, pre-assigned recliner seats. Like most current horror films, it imparts a gentle Glade Plug-In odor of mainstream leftist politics while it "scares" the audience with loud, startling noises and CGI kabuki faces from "The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen." In this case, the political message comes in the form of a gratuitously included lower-class white couple who rudely invite themselves into the Blair Witch woods along with the more symmetrically diverse and civilized (two whites, two blacks) main characters. The lower-class whites have a Confederate flag on their wall and are symbolic representatives of the "dark Internet"--the boy's screename is "DarkNet666"--that wilderness of Reddit and "creepy MRAs" that leftists fret about and say is in need of HR department regulation and censorship. The lower-class whites act as a sort of red herring when it is revealed that they are trying to spook the city folks by making Blair Witch stick people and putting them around the campsite. The real Blair Witch, which appears in CGI flashes as something similar to the human-alien hybrid from "Alien: Resurrection," is still actually terrorizing everyone, though. DarkNet666 becomes the Blair Witch's henchman at the end, indicating that people into "weird," antisocial things will likely go over to the dark side.